John Cleese on Life: SPAM Is a Four

It’s fitting that comedy icon John Cleese will stop in San Jose on Sept. 14, given the city’s place at the heart of Silicon Valley and Monty Python’s absurdly significant contribution to technology culture. Thanks to Cleese and his colleagues, what was once a vanilla acronym—UCE, or Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail—is today more colorfully known as “spam.” Adopted by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998 and the U.S. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission in their CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, the rebranding has its roots in a famously untethered 1970 episode of the British television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

In a conversation last week, Cleese reflected on its origins. “I’d always been fascinated by eating at transport cafes, which is where the truck drivers eat,” he recalle